TWO GIRLS WIN WESTINGHOUSE COMPETITION

By SAM HOWE VERHOVEK

Published: March 3, 1987

WASHINGTON, March 2 - A girl from Westmont, Ill., and a girl from Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan were named the nation's top young scientists tonight in the Westinghouse Science Talent Search, the first time that girls have won the two highest awards the country's oldest and most prestigious competition for teen-age scientists.

Louise Chia Chang, a 17-year-old senior from Westmont, Ill., won first place among the 10 awards announced hereand a $20,000 scholarship for her university-level research on genes active in certain cancer cells. She credited her family with sparking her interest in science.

''My father bought my older sister a microscope,'' she said, ''and I found that looking at lettuce leaves under 400-X magnification was more fun than eating it for lunch.''

Elizabeth Lee Wilmer, a 16-year-old senior at Stuyvesant High School who plans to attend either Harvard or Stanford, won second prize and $15,000 for her mathematics investigations into the properties a map must have so that only three colors are needed to indi-cate separate regions, with no two adjoining regions having the same color.

''If you prove a theorem that enables you to find a polynomial time algorithm for deciding whether a graph is three-colorable,'' Miss Wilmer said, ''then you can find polynomial time algorithms for all sorts of other very famous, very hard problems, such as the traveling salesman's problem.'' That involves figuring out the shortest, quickest way for a salesman to call on clients in a number of different cities.

The 46-year-old Science Talent Search, sponsored by the Westinghouse Electric Corporation and administered by Science Service, an educational organization, has long been noted for compiling a roster of the nation's most promising young scientists. Past winners have gone on to rack up scores of scientific awards, including five Nobel Prizes.

The scholarships to the 10 winners totaled $110,000; in addition, each of the 30 other finalists received $1,000. All 40 finalists received five-day trips here to exhibit their projects and undergo what several of them described as an ''intimdating'' series of interviews with judges who evaluated not just their projects, but their scientific creativity in general.

The judges were fond of ''asking questions for which no one in the world knows the answer, just to see how the kids would respond,'' said Charles F. Carroll, a Westinghouse spokesman.

The contestants set up booths at the National Academy of Sciences over the weekend and described their projects to visitors. The event provided a rich mosaic of fields of inquiry and of project titles such as ''Laser Cooling in an Optical Molasses,'' ''Inca Stone Transport and Manpower Requirement,'' ''An Analysis of Elastic Rod Collisions'' and ''Stigma of Psychotherapy.''

Two entrants said they had patents pending on their research.

The selection of Miss Chang as the top winner appeared to come as little surprise to the other young scientists. ''She's brilliant,'' one said on Sunday. ''Just go over and talk to her -you'll see what I mean.''

Miss Chang, whose booth was ringed with 1,360 colored beads that represented the sequence of DNA units in a cancer gene that she studied, cheerfully described her work as ''fairly abstract.''

She and the winner of the seventh-place award, Maxwell V. Meng of Columbia, Md., discovered during the judging of their projects that their mothers had sat next to each other in junior high school in Taipei, Taiwan, 35 years ago.

New York State has typically dominated the contest, having produced four times as many winners as any other state and one year winning eight of the top ten places.

This year, 15 of the 40 finalists and 3 of the 10 winners came from New York.

Daniel J. Bernstein, a 15-year-old senior at Bellport High School in Suffolk County, L.I., won fifth place for his work on new algorithms for calculating infinite numbers such as pi and e, the base of natural logarithms. He became one of the youngest winners ever in the Westinghouse competition.

''I can't remember a time when I wasn't interested in math,'' he said, but he quickly added that he had a range of other hobbies, including lobbying for environmental causes.

Ninth place went to Maria Jose Silveira, 17, a senior at the Bronx High School of Science, for her research on a parasite that causes severe neurological damage in fetuses. Her parents emigrated from Uruguay in 1968.

These were the other winners in the competition: Third place - Albert Jun-Wei Wong of Oak Ridge, Tenn., who designed a computer system that mimics how the brain works. Fourth place - Joseph Chen-Yu Wang of

Ocala, Fla., who researched ''Jupiter's Radio Waves.'' Sixth place - Stephen A. Racunas, 16, of New

Kensington, Pa., for a project in atomic physics. Eighth place - Todd A. Waldman, 18, of Bethesda, Md., eighth, for research in molecular biology. Tenth place - Michael P. Mossey, 18, of Cincinnati, for mathematics research by computer.